When you have a groundbreaking idea, chances are you probably won’t make it happen in a vacuum. You need investors and support personnel to bring that thought to fruition. Enter the pitch deck. Those 10 to 20 slides are the crucial marketing tool that shares your exciting idea with investors, potential clients, or team members and how they can help it grow. However, the presentation and design of your deck can make the difference between hitting your presentation out of the park and simply striking out.
With a Great Pitch Deck Comes Great Responsibility…to Communicate
Start with a clear message and outline. Make sure the pitch deck actually states your mission. You’d be amazed how often a mission is never communicated. Define the problem and then share the solution you propose. Highlight the growth opportunity in the market. Why should investors express interest if they see no potential benefits? Plan a call to action and share it. You can do all this in a pitch deck, and it never has to be boring. After all, without that information, there’s no gain for anyone. It’s a swing and a miss. You don’t want that.
Know Your Audience(s)
To whom are you pitching your idea? Is it a room full of potential investors? Are you talking to colleagues or the average Joe? While you might not be a natural storyteller, a well-done pitch deck helps tell your story for you, and you can tailor it to specific audiences and motivations. Don’t fall into the trap of creating your pitch deck for a niche audience. You may find an audience in a place you didn’t expect. Make it versatile or, ideally, create more than one. Often just changing the copy changes the pitch deck. Don’t re-invent the wheel.
Make Them Want to Look
Now that you know who your audience is, grab their attention. If your pitch or the deck is boring, it simply won’t succeed and your message will get lost. Get things moving with motion. A motion-driven pitch deck draws the eye and holds attention better. Without it, there’s little that differentiates your pitch deck from a dreaded PowerPoint presentation. You want your pitch deck to be so much more than that.
Recently, Inspire Agency worked with Strados Labs, whose innovative respiratory tracking device may radically transform how doctors track pulmonary issues in patients. Using digitized lung sounds, Inspire Agency created motion in Strados’ pitch deck that illustrates the current problems with pulmonary monitoring, captures Strados’ groundbreaking idea, potential for investors, and innovative solutions. At its core, it was simply a graph for investors, but it certainly doesn’t look like one. It captures viewers’ attention and beautifully tells the story.
Become a Minimalist
With a pitch deck, less is more. Share your message succinctly with words and graphics. Don’t clutter it with too much information or irrelevant charts and graphs. Designing Strados’ pitch deck, we chose to work mostly in blacks, whites, and grays. The images are quite minimal, but with big pops of bright color to catch and draw the eye to emphasize key points. It works!
Ideally, use professionals to generate the graphics for your pitch deck. With so much riding on it, don’t settle for less than the best. Avoid cheesy graphics and cutesy fonts.
As for the copy, carefully choose the wording. There’s no reason to inundate your audience with lots of text or technical jargon. The pitch deck isn’t the place for those, and many times your audience won’t understand the lingo. Remember, you want to pitch your product or idea, not train specialists.
Make it Personal
It’s easy to lose sight of your objective because you are close to your product or idea. While that’s not great for design purposes, use your intimacy with the product to better tell your story. Explain why you wanted to solve the problem.
Strados’ device began as a simple idea for their founder Nick, who has asthma and needed a way for his doctor to track his pulmonary sounds. The existing method was so inconvenient, inefficient, and unpleasant Nick thought, “There must be a better way to do this!” There wasn’t—so Nick invented one! It’s a powerful story, and it makes a fantastic pitch. That story lives throughout the Strados pitch deck. He created the product because he needed the solution.
Don’t be afraid to take your personal story and have it shine through your pitch deck. That personal information connects with investors and audiences alike. Use it!
Get Inspired
At Inspire Agency, we can create a pitch deck that will wow your investors and captivate your audience. With the Inspire Way, we will Inquire about your product, your mission, and then Infuse the talents of our professionals to generate a pitch deck that is as engaging as it is effective. Let us Inspire you.
